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<center><b><font size="+2">retawq Documentation</font><br><font
size="+1">Contributing</font></b></center>

<p>If you'd like to contribute to retawq, the following short list is intended
to indicate which kinds of contributions would be useful and which ones might
rather waste your time.</p>

<ul>
<li>Reports about compilation/build failures are highly appreciated. I'm not
able to test compilation on all possible combinations of hardware, Unix-like
operating systems, libraries etc., so the program might not yet build in some
environments.</li>
<li>Reports about crashes of the program are highly appreciated. Reports about
less severe problems (especially "cosmetical" ones) might often be pointless -
many such problems are already known or not important enough at the current
stage of development or will simply go away soon when the respective part of
the program is overhauled in a later version.</li>
<li>Requests about new or improved features are appreciated. Dozens of features
are planned, but actual requests usually change the priorities and the order in
which the features get implemented. So, say what you'd like to have and how
important it is for you. Please keep in mind that one major goal of this
project is to keep it <i>small</i> - monstrous things like a fully-fledged
built-in HTML editor and web page authoring framework won't happen in retawq.
:-)</li>
<li>Translations of user interface texts to natural languages which aren't yet
supported are appreciated, but please keep in mind that this means quite some
work at the beginning and a long-term maintenance. :-) Before you start
translating, please contact me in order to avoid duplicate work. You should be
a native speaker of the language and a skilled writer in general, particularly
regarding all those technical notions related to computers, user interfaces and
networks. To get an impression, have a look at the existing translations - the
".po" files in the directory "i18n/".</li>
<li>Please don't start contributing to the source code - at least not at the
current stage of development. Many features are already "more or less"
implemented and are just not yet visible in the public releases because they
aren't yet "ready". (Lots of things are cut out, beautified or otherwise
converted when a release package is auto-generated.) Also, your patches would
not apply to the development tree due to these differences. Just to give an
impression: once in March 2004, the output of "wc&nbsp;--lines&nbsp;*.[ch]" was
far beyond 25,000 for the development tree and about 22,000 for the public
release that would have resulted; the size of the .tar.gz file was beyond 400
KB for the development tree (although it e.g. doesn't contain the hardly
compressable ".mo" files) and about 300 KB for the release.</li>
</ul>

<p>When reporting any sort of problem, please have a look at the documentation
file <a href="report.html">Reporting Problems</a>.

<p><hr>This documentation file is part of version 0.2.6c of <a
href="http://retawq.sourceforge.net/">retawq</a>, a network client created by
<span lang="de">Arne Thoma&szlig;en</span>. retawq is basically released under
certain versions of the GNU General Public License and WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
Copyright (C) 2001-2006 <a href="mailto:arne@arne-thomassen.de"><span
lang="de">Arne Thoma&szlig;en</span></a>.</p>
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